Kingman to Las Vegas
The mountain drive from Kingman saw predictably spectacular scenery, and the desert begins to look like proper desert - although there's still far too much vegetation for my liking - I want a proper Lawrence of Arabia desert (I suppose I ought to have gone to the Middle East).
Getting into Las Vegas, we spent about an hour in a traffic jam seeking out Waves music shop, because I had some vouchers to redeem (thanks Paul).
Debbie had phoned around a few hotels from the flea pit motel in Kingman in search of something cheap. Everything was disappointingly expensive, but since we wanted to be on The Strip, we accepted a $70 per night room at the Imperial Palace - a hotel/casino with a Chinese theme.
When we got there it turned out the room was huge, and some sort of seduction palace: bed with mirrored ceiling, 300 gallon bathtub... quite a step up from last night's $25 effort, which was opposite the motel where Timothy McVeigh spent the week before the Oklahoma City bombing...
Vegas merits a bullet list:
- Popped into most hotels to sample the theming
- Roller Coaster in New York New York
- Tasty food in a restaurant in Ceasar's Palace
- Evaluated the cocktail waitresses uniforms in various casinos: Imperial Palace won hands down with a dinky little blue chinese-style minidress
- Merlin vs Dragon show outside Excalibur - shoddy
- Holy pilgrimage to the Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo machine in Excalibur. Debbie thrashed me at it of course, as always.
- Dancing Fountains at the Bellagio Hotel - quite a spectacular
- Slept
- Attempted to find a scheduled Roulette lesson for beginners. We went to the right place, but nothing seemed to be happening.
- Went to the Stratosphere in the hope of riding their roller coaster at the top of the tower -- but another thunderstorm put paid to that idea.
- Went to Splash!, a variety show at the Rivera hotel. The show had no theme whatsover to hold it together (I guess that makes it variety), but we saw some incredible stuff -- stunning Mexican jugglers, a woman who could hula-hoop many hoops while smiling and ice skating, a contortionist, a motorbike wall of death, and some singing and dancing.
- Treasure Island's spectacular pirate ship battle
- Mirage's pretty volcano "eruption" (fire, water and lights)
We sniggered at each other as he talked about himself for 10 minutes, until the show started.
Our tip for Las Vegas is: play video poker. Make no mistake - you will lose money. The game is as rigged as the sails on the Treasure Island pirate ships -- but your money trickles away quite slowly. Between us we made $15 last at least 2 hours (on 25c machines) -- and in that time we were brought 4 free drinks each.
The atmosphere in the slot rooms is strangely hypnotic - all the machines beep at two or three different pitches, all of which are in harmony. With so many machines in the room, although each machine is silent most of the time, there is never silence, but a constant, ever-moving "slot drone".
We intended to play something on the proper tables; roulette, blackjack, something like that - but quite aside from the fear of (a) losing a lot of money (b) doing something wrong and upsetting other players, we had no idea how to get started. The casinos don't seem to provide an easy way to find out. The TV in the room had a channel with the rules for many of the games, but nothing about elementary stuff like "where do I obtain gaming chips?" (I still don't know).
In the end we decided that although we felt we "should" play some kind
of table, neither of us actually wanted to, so we didn't.